Monday, May 04, 2009

Spoilers for tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as a clown predicts the weather...

Stella is not the Mother.

Of that, I feel confident -- as confident as I can about a show that, by design, has had to draw out the premise of its title for four years now with various head fakes and potential loves of Ted's life who turned out to be anything but.

My guess is that, as some people speculated last year, the Mother will turn out to be a friend of Stella's, with whom she went out with on the same St. Patrick's Day night when Ted stole the yellow umbrella(*). Ted and Stella will reconnect, she'll feel bad again about dumping him on their wedding day, and as a peace offering she'll fix him up with the eventual Mother. This is my assumption. I liked Sarah Chalke as Stella at first, but the writers didn't know what to do with her except have her and Ted get into fights about how they shouldn't be together, and the events of "Shelter Island" -- particularly the hypothetical flash-forward to a future where Stella was the mom, and Future Ted was telling the story to two different, blonde, kids -- would seem to make it clear that the show can't and won't try going down that path again.

(*) We saw Ted and Barney out on the town that night in "No Tomorrow," and Stella mentioned having gone out to a bar that night in "Ten Sessions."

But here's the thing: as I said in that "Shelter Island" review, the show has given us too many red herrings, and Ted's romantic life has proven to be one of the least interesting parts of the show, that I've largely lost interest in who the Mother is and when we get to meet her. Unless they have a terrific actress in mind -- someone who pops on the screen, and is funny, and has chemistry with Josh Radnor at least as good as Cobie Smulders or, say, Ashley Williams did -- then I'd rather the show not be going here now. If the casting and conecption of the Mother isn't perfect, I'd rather the show just wait till the end of its very last episode, have Ted bump into a woman at a party, and hear Saget go, "And that, kids, is how I met your mother. Good night."

Or, failing that, I'd like to see the show take the same approach it did in season two, where Ted was with Robin, and happy, and therefore the series was able to spend most of its time on other, funnier, more compelling storylines while Ted and Robin's couplehood was just taken for granted.

Because on a show where I was still invested in that kind of foundational story arc, I'd have been tearing my hair out each time the episode jumped away from Ted with the yellow umbrella to show yet another vignette explaining how he got there. Instead, I found myself enjoying the vignettes so much I kept forgetting the reason they were there.

Heck, I even loved the return of the Intervention gag (from the episode of the same name, also written by Stephen Lloyd), when I disliked it the first time out. I guess it was one of those Letterman things where the sudden return of a joke I had quickly grown sick of somehow made it funny all over again. That, or it was just the surprise of it, and the complete lack of commentary, and the looks of disgust on Ted, Robin and Barney's faces, that made it work.

I was also amused that Marshall went to the trouble of computing Barney's success rate (foreshadowing of his pie chart addiction), because from the minute Barney announced he was about to reach the 200-woman number, I kept asking myself, "Isn't that too low?" My approach was a little different, in that I just divided 200 by the last decade (while he was sexually active before that, it wasn't that often) and came up with under two women a month. This would be a lot for most men, but for a blatant himbo like Barney, and one who prides himself on rarely bedding the same woman twice? Seemed low to me. So I'm glad Marshall did the math on it. (And, as an added bonus, he compared it to Jim Abbott's batting average, making "HIMYM" the second excellent comedy this spring to do a random Jim Abbott joke.)

Funny episode and an outstanding use of Guide By Voices' "Glad Girls." But I'm holding my breath on the Mother thing. Whether it's Stella, Stella's friend, or someone Stella will accidentally introduce Ted to, it looks like the show is finally going for it. And I really hope they get it right -- especially since the look on Barney's face when he ripped up his list and peered over at Robin had me a lot more excited than finding out who was under the blue umbrella.

74 comments:

I was a bit more angry than you were in my review, Alan, but had much the same reaction: Stella can't be the Mother based on what we've been shown, and more importantly it's getting to the point where the mythology is getting tired.

That being said, your reaction the B-stories were the same as mine: I think the writers knew that both Ted as a character and the title story can't sustain an episode on their own, so it actually wasn't an episode about Ted in the end and I was happy for it.

My one frustration, to be honest, was that it wasn't a story about Barney: I thought his story could have been an episode all on its own, and in many ways the idea that this was his transition from Old Barney to "Ready to go after Robin Barney" doesn't work for me (speaking of the Coda here).

But overall, they smartly packed this one with enough humour to convince me that they haven't gone insane enough to let horrible, unlikable Stella be the Mother.

Yeah, I'm really more surprised that I didn't figure out it would be Stella (or maybe Ashley Williams) ahead of time. I actually figured they were going to hold the reveal on the other umbrella until the season finale. But I did feel rather jerked around.

Also, "Robin Scherbatsky vomiting" does not bring up an appropriate clip on YouTube.

I really enjoyed this episode (although I, of course, missed Lily desperately). But I got a phone call with about 6 minutes to go and missed the whole Barney at the bar with the guy and the look at Robin part. My husband was watching Yankees vs. Red Sox on the TV with the DVR. Can anyone help a gal out? I just want to know what happened!!!!

Help me Alan, you're my only hope (until either Wednesday when TWoP publishes the full recap or tomorrow when I can watch the last 6 minutes at work when my boss isn't around, but I don't think I can wait that long)!

I was actually *happy* to see the yellow umbrella come out, along with all it meant. Then a funny episode followed with a couple of cameos that thrilled the hell out of me. Sweeps were looking up. And then came Stella.

I know she's not going to be the mother, but I really hope she's not going to be around for too long. She's just such a terrible character, Sarah Chalke's charm notwithstanding.

I'm so glad that I just read your review. After HIMYM ended tonight, I kept saying, this must be it, we finally know who the mother is. But something just didn't seem right. I love your theory on the mother being a friend of Stella's.

I'm already a sucker for the "pop songs as charts and graphs" meme that was going around about a year ago, so I enjoyed the Cecilia bit. But when it got to "and this is the bar chart of my favorite pies" I swear almost passed out from laughing.

One thing with Barney's number is that Marshall used 16 years to divide by buy, but it's probably only been 5 or 6, since it seems like when he was in his pre-suit life he was just with one girl and he wasn't even having sex with her at that point (as far as I can remember). So if you factor that into it, it works out to about 35 or so a year. Which seems a lot more plausible.

I'm with you Alan. I love Sarah Chalke, but, except for "Ten Sessions", Stella just didn't work as a character. Also, this doesn't track with much of the mythology, including the tidbit from the end of the last episode: Ted called her immediately after meeting her. I think we can assume he didn't do that with Stella.

But like you said, HIMYM is more about just hanging out with fun characters than any overarching mythology. (The mother's maiden name should be MacGuffin.) Heck, I'm more interested in the goat than the mother.

And with only two episodes left this season, and one likely advancing the mother story, the other must be the goat, right? Right?!

I'm a bit of a HIMYM outlier, in that I totally don't hate Ted. I like Ted; I feel for Ted. Ted is making an effort, he can be funny, he can be very romantic, he's a generous person in many ways...I don't hate Ted.

I did, however, really not like Stella, and unlike many, I didn't like Stella all along, at least for Ted.

At this point, I don't really care who the mother is that much. I certainly hope it isn't Stella (and I think it isn't Stella), and I would just love it if it were someone really lively and fun -- kinda along the Ashley Williams line. I like Ted more with girls who are goofy, as opposed to with girls who take themselves too seriously or are taken too seriously as beauties. But as much as I'd like that mystery to just kind of be out of the way, I don't care that much.

I loved the charts as well as the moment that Barney asked Marshall if Lily could be 199.

As the Ted plot was moving on, I kept thinking "but this isn't the season finale is it? wouldn't they reveal the mother as a cliffhanger?" and so I ascribe to your theory that Stella is not the mother but the conduit to her. Besides, it just wouldn't make sense for older Ted to refer to "your mother" but also mention Stella by her first name, if she was the kids mother.

I also think more will be done with Barney realizing his conquest was pointless. NPH is just to good to waste on a quick coda. Both final scenes were meant as teasers to the actual finale, and not as a foregone conclusion.

You know, I'm really, really, REALLY tired of getting jerked around by this show. How many head fakes on the Mother are they going to give us? It's pretty clear that Stella isn't the Mother, and I'll make book on them not telling us who the Mother is next week, either.

And that would be fine, except they keep making a HUGE deal out of "OK, now here comes the mother....." only to leave us with nothing. It's distracting, it's insulting, and it's pissing me off! Enough already!!

That said, a pie chart about bars and a bar chart about pies still has me laughing....

And hey, no one has mentioned the nice cameo by Dan Castellanetta (aka the voice of Homer Simpson) as the homeless guy. Not the funniest character ever, but I do hope we see more of him; the dollar-a-day thing could become a nice running gag.

@Louis and @Jeff L, Thanks! I'd never actually heard anything by them (not true, but it's never registered). I'm listening to the song right now.

Also, why did Ted have the yellow umbrella? Wasn't the "Mother" supposed to have the yellow umbrella? I could swear we have seen her walking around with the umbrella at other times, where we didn't see her face. I want to say she was walking outside MacLaren's at some point, with the yellow umbrella...?

One thing that kind of bothers me is that we have two different conflicting stories of why Barney became the suit-wearing womanizing Barney that we know. In this episode, he's been out to prove he can have sex with 200 women since he was twelve years old. But in a previous episode, we saw 90s hippy Barney who was all about committing to one woman, until she left him for some D-bag in a suit, whom Barney then decided to emulate.

Augh. I am also tired with the playing around for who the Mother is. I don't care who the mother is, but my bet is on either The Slutty Pumpkin and Victoria. Still the Stella reveal was so unexpected that I had to smile.

Otherwise, it was a good episode. Someone clear this up for me, if Barney has been having sex for 16 years and he lost his virginity at 23... does that make him 39? Or did I misinterpret the chart? So confused.

I too thought the 200 was low for Barney. A high number for anyone in real life, but for the lovable cartoon that is his character, I would've thought closer to 1000. I thought we would get Robin's number, but I guess her silence was enough.

I did like the use of veteran TV writer Gabby Allan's name as one of Barney's conquests. (Scrubs writer.)

And I adored the chart scene in the bar. The Presidents was funny, the bar/pie thing really funny, and the Cecilia joke possibly my favorite the series has ever done. Bravo!

I was disappointed to see Stella mainly because no way does her character hold up to Robin's. In fact, it's hard to see a relationship as fun as Ted and Robin's was -- because Robin somehow balanced out the more annoying parts of Ted's personality. Someone more suited for him -- and possibly more like him -- probably wouldn't be as enjoyable to see with him.

So I agree that unless there's a major casting and writing coup that just outdoes all our expectations, having the actual mother turn up can't do the show any favors.

Throughout the umbrella scenes, I kept thinking "No way are we about to meet the mother. How are the writers going to get out of this?" And when they finally revealed who it was, I thought "Oh. That's a neat way to do it." I don't except to meet the mother next episode, but would be fine with it if we did, too.

I'm about 99.9 percent confident that in the episode where we last saw Stella, Ted (in narrator form) said something along the lines of, "I never saw Stella again," or "that was the last time I saw Stella." Which bugs me because this show is usually so good with continuity, but if my memory serves, and I think it does, this was an epic fail.

It was kind of ruined for me because I read the episode description (on my DVR TV guide sort of thing) before I watched it. And the description flat out told told me "Ted bumps into an old flame and learns a life lesson about destiny." So, for an episode designed to suck me into thinking it was building up to him meeting the mom, I spent the whole thing assuming I was about to see Stella or that chick who worked in a bakery. And I figured it was going to be one of those things where he claims he learned a lesson that he had to learn to be prepared for when he finally met his destiny.

Also, have to agree with the previous poster about not being wild about the throwaway scene with the show hinting that Barney is now ready to make Robin his new goal. It's like that moment when he was in the hospital a season ago and they made it seem like he realized Robin was what he cared about most -- only for him to, of course, come back acting the same way he always has, going after other women. It's also not unlike their throwaway scene a couple weeks back when Ted went on a date with that girl who creeped him out by acting the way he does on dates (talking about love and marriage right away). I don't expect anything to actually change, and I don't think it's some big gag that the characters will keep acting the way they always have despite seeming to have learned their lessons. I dunno.

I cannot reprint (in a family blog) my reaction to seeing Stella at the end. That was NOT what I wanted to see.

So, instead, I will ask something that bothered me through the whole episode, and which no one seems to have addressed here: everyone was looking over Barney's list of 199 women...but shouldn't Robin's name BE on that list? No one noticed it? Robin didn't look for it and worry the others would see it? So, perhaps, the model WASN'T actually going to be 200?

I think Barney's transformation from 90's hippie into womanizing suit-wearing Barney is still plausible, even though he had pledged to take down 200 women in grade 8 or so.

Perhaps he grew into the hippie way of life when he met his "pure" girlfriend, abandoned his dreams of surpassing his classmate in sex numbers, but then took up his mission in earnest when his girlfriend cheated on him with the suit!

I did think it was clever how they retraced Ted's steps back from the stop light where he saw Stella. Call it kismet or whatever, but these things do happen in life and what seem to be most benign actions--like stopping to read a magazine--can change the course of ones life. It reminded me of the film Sliding Doors, very well done.

And after digesting the end, I do agree with Alan that the mother will not be Stella although if it really were one of her friends, why wouldn't she have gone to the wedding? Perhaps a friend of a friend. Who knows, all I can say is that the past few episodes have been among the more enjoyable this season. I hope they can keep it up.

hated HATED the ending for all the reasons stated above (Ted's ending, not Barney's) I don't like Stella at all, and tired of all the Red Herrings.

Also if you think about it the ending doesn't jive with the rest of the show. Ted already knows Stella so if either she is the one (which I'm sure she's not) or she points him to the one he did not have to be at that exact spot, at that exact time, for him to meet the mother. He could've been down the block, across the street, whatever - and she see's him and waits for him. (also if she hooks him up out of guilt she could've just called him on the phone anytime). the only way his destiny thing works is if he literally runs into the mother at that crosswalk.

Maybe I'm being too literal but this ending really pissed me off.

Everything else on the show was fine but I do miss Lilly and Marshall.

Beautiful as Sarah Chalke is, there's a reason she's not a hand model. I could have sworn it was Death himself reaching out for Ted.She has man-hands.

I honestly thought it was a guy tapping him on the shoulder lol.

And, count me in the camp of those NOT missing Lily. She's always been very easy on the eyes, and I do miss that a bit, but from a comedy standpoint, she doesn't bring anything to the table on this show.

I can't believe no one else fell out at Barneys comment about how his bodybuilder conquest was in SEXXY and like most women in that magazine was sexy spelled with an 'XXY' (chromosome disorder making her not genetically female). I apologize for butchering the joke, i don't have the episode to go back to.

My husband and I had to pause the DVR. (not because of any gender-identity phobias, but because the joke was so damn cleverly executed)

I had guessed that the episode would end with Robin realizing she wasn't on the list, and Barney realizing she was more than a simple conquest to him and blah blah blah. I was kind of glad not to see it go in that direction.

I also didn't get the pie chart about bars and bar chart about pies until reading the comments here, now i can recognize it for its full genius. The Cecilia chart reminded me (happily) of Eddie Izzaed talking about growing up with Venn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBpWwC9qNpA

I don't ever expect them to reveal the mother until the show ends. So I saw no point in getting worked up about OMG THERE'S THE MOTHER, and I didn't. I didn't expect them to show anyone at all and leave it as a lame cliffhanger, so when Stella showed up I was all, "Well, hey, I wasn't expecting that." She's not the mother, folks, so don't freak. She's just another link in the chain of "we're still not finding out until the show ends, so don't get worked up about this episode."

That said, the rest of it was still darned good even sans Lily and with addressing The Yellow Umbrella crap just to remind the audience that theoretically there's a mother. Robin flat-out saying she's pregnant and being covered in more purses and puking in 'em and Ted "stepping up" and Barney fleeing for his life? Marshall's pie charts and math and intervention? Comedy gold.

(Though yes, I was also, "Dude, wrong math, he lost it at 23 and he's not nearing 40 yet.")

They never did show Barney finding out Robin isn't pregnant, did they?

I have to admit to being shocked at Barney ripping up the list, though. Kind of a "whoa" moment, even though I don't expect him to give up the womanizing forever.

I'm a recently new viewer of HIMYM, I just got caught up on the last seasons right before we started watching this one... so I apologize if this has been talked to death... but does anyone think the mother is the girl that Ted "randomly" bumped into in the bar on St. Patty's Day? There was a moment where he bumped into a girl and they paused and said "I'm sorry" and it just seemed to me to be such an awkward random moment that I feel like there is something to it. Maybe she and Stella were friends at that bar that night or something? Just a thought.

She's not the mother, folks, so don't freak. She's just another link in the chain of "we're still not finding out until the show ends, so don't get worked up about this episode.....................I don't sense anybody really "freaking out" over this episode, what I sense- and what I personally feel is complete apathy at this point-and if there is any anger it that they wasted 10 minutes of a 22 minute show trying to be clever.

Remind me: Are we certain Barney lost his virginity at 23? I know he and his hippie girlfriend were saving themselves for each other, but wasn't he supposed to be a teenager when his brother brought him to the "Man Maker" back in "The Yips"? He may have taken some time off from gettin' some, but if he is 32 or so, then 16 years is correct. It is just not entirely fair. It's like counting the years he was retired to determine Michael Jordan's lifetime stats.

That said, even counting from 23 (assuming Barney is 32), his batting average is .021, which is still worse than a quarter of Jim Abbott's.

Steve said:Is there an end date of the series? Will there be another season?The series was renewed for two more seasons a little while back, for syndication.

I don't think Stella is the mother (the writers must know fans didn't receive her very well)Just because some people here don't like Stella, it doesn't necessarily follow that people who aren't on the internet feel the same way. Some fans, sure, but not the majority that you imply.

MMM wrote:While this might be expected of him, in The Bracket he claimed he would never demean the women he slept with by putting them on "some tawdry list". He then followed this up by pulling out a scrapbook.OK, so he changed his mind and went through the scrapbook and made a list. No biggie.

Besides, we already know that Stella isn't THE ONE because the hypothetical kids of Ted and Stella were not the ones he's been talking to in flashback.

@ Anonymous: I could get onboard with an end date like "LOST" got, just so they can plot out the big story more coherently.

But, then, it kind of bums me out, because I'm not sure I'd want the show to end any earlier than it has to just for the sake of tightening up the weakest aspect of the show. If giving us a flimsier reveal of the mother (with more holes in the story) gives us an extra season or two of hilarious non-Ted content, I'd take that tradeoff. And we could just chalk it up to the Unreliable Narrator, and be happy we got dozens of extra episodes.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind if they eventually changed the whole premise of the show. Wrap up the mother story, but somehow keep it going by having him transition into a new story.

It would probably take really creative editing/writing, since Ted's kids have already gotten too old to come back and film new stuff, but who knows what footage they filmed of them already waiting to be used?

For all we know, they have enough different bits with the kids reacting or asking questions, maybe they have some trap-door built in where, once he's told the story how he met the mom, he then gets to transition into another story somehow. Something focusing on Barney, maybe.

Maybe when he reveals the mother, he accidentally reveals something else, which shocks the kids, and then he gets to go into a new phase of the story.

Surprised no one has mentioned this but its hard to believe stella is the mother. she already has a kid, and unless ted's new kids are total idiots they would pick up on the fact that they have an older stepsister which would ruin his whole story. this is not how i became your stepfather or how she became your stepsister. Just seems weird that if she was the mother the kids would not pick up on this. God we watch this show too much.